How does a message reach him from the outside? Except by that most valuable hunting ground ever given to the student of the unusual, Agony Columns. My name is Rick Cleffel, and welcome to the Agony Column Literary Magazine on public radio for the Central Coast, KUSP 88.9 FM. I’ll be your host for the next hour of conversation with the authors of books worth your valuable reading time. Tonight on the Agony Column, William Ury, co-author of Getting to Yes and co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, describes how his work in international negotiations and his personal life helped him to write his new book, Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. And on time to read, we’ll look back for a lightning round with Stuart O’Nan about his new novel, West of Sunset, which recreates the final days of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. We’ll start the show with William Ury reading from Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. How can we get to yes with others? How can we resolve the conflicts that naturally arise with colleagues and bosses, spouses and partners, clients and customers, children and family members, indeed almost everyone we interact with? How can we get what we really want and at the same time, deal with the needs of others in our lives? Perhaps no human dilemma is more pervasive or challenging. William Ury is the co-founder of Harvard’s Negotiation Program and a distinguished senior fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project. He’s the co-author with Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton of the world’s best-selling book on negotiation, the classic Getting to Yes, the power of a positive no, Getting Past No, and The Third Side. He’s served as a negotiations advisor and mediator in conflicts ranging from Kentucky wildcat coal mine strikes to ethnic wars in the Middle East, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Union. He has taught negotiation and mediation to tens of thousands of corporate executives, labor leaders, diplomats, and military officers around the world. He’s helped hundreds of businesses and organizations reach mutually profitable agreements with customers, suppliers, unions, and joint venture partners. His new book is Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. It’s an honor to speak with you, William. It’s my pleasure, Rick. What was the one big event in your life that led you to the core of this book, the negotiation you had to make with yourself that made you realize that that was an issue? Well, Rick, it was simultaneously something going on in my professional work as a mediator and at the same time, something going on in my personal life as a father. I’ll just start with the personal. My daughter, Gabriella, was born 16, 17 years ago with congenital problems that required huge medical processes like 15 major surgeries. So I was dealing with not just negotiating as I’m often trying to do, helping other people get to yes. I was having to, my wife and I were having to get to yes with doctors and nurses and insurance companies at a time when we were fearing for the very life of our daughter. So I was able to observe myself and my wife. We were tending to be reactive because there was a lot of emotion going on and there’s a tendency sometimes even to, which I often see in conflicts, which is you wanna either blame yourself or you blame the other. And so I realized that unless we got to yes with ourselves really and could just be calm and clear, we wouldn’t actually be able to help our daughter and we wouldn’t be able to get to yes as we needed to with doctors and nurses and insurance companies. And then I watched that as actually in my daughter herself, actually it was quite amazing. As an example of this, she’s like, she is able to, she’s just able to stay in the present. She goes through a surgery and then she puts it behind her and she just makes every day fun and enjoyable. And if I could just tell one quick story about her, she never let her medical issues, which are huge, get in the way of her life. And she always wanted to be in the Guinness Book of World Records. That’s an unusual ambition. So when she was seven, she tried the longest hopscotch course and then when she tried, maybe she was eight or nine, she tried most socks on one foot. But a year ago, she decided, for my 16th birthday, I’m gonna try and get in the Guinness Book of World Records for an exercise. I don’t know if you know abdominal exercise called the plank, where you lie down on the ground, you put your elbows down, you try to hold your body flat. I can do it for maybe a minute or two. I don’t know how long you’ve been doing it for, but she wrote away for the world record and the female world record was 40 minutes. Well, she started training and we were supporting her whatever she wants to do. And lo and behold, at her birthday party, she did this and we had to have the cameras and everything ready just to capture it, the moment. And she was able to go for an hour and 20 minutes. Wow. So if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records 2015, you’ll see Gabi Uri there. The next week she was on Good Morning America and she just did a TED Talk. But just the example of someone who just does not, we often get so incapacitated by our inner critic, I can’t do it, I’m gonna be a failure, whatever. We criticize ourselves, but the ability to just to put ourselves in our own shoes and choose to frame, we can either choose to frame life as friendly or unfriendly, and she would have every reason to frame life as unfriendly somehow against her, but she doesn’t do it. She really sees it on her side and she manifests that in her reality. So that, to me, over the last 16 years, has been a huge part of what brought about this book. And then there was also, in my professional life, working as a mediator in some very tumultuous situations. In particular, about 14, 15 years ago, I was working in the country of Venezuela as a mediator between the government, between Hugo Chavez and his opposition. And I had occasion to really reflect on this process of getting to yes with myself and how it affected my ability to help others get to yes. What’s so good about this book, I think, is for one thing, you get straight to the point. It’s really nice, the brevity, and you’ve developed your own argot, I think, and that’s, I think, really an essential part of writing a book like this. You have the balcony, you have a whole series of terms and metaphors. So I’d like to just step back a little bit and tell us about crafting the argot and the vocabulary and the metaphors and the analogies that make your concepts clear as a writer. Well, it’s a really good question, and I don’t think anyone’s ever actually asked me that question, so I really appreciate hearing it. For me, ever since I started in this field, my mind, I like simplicity. I like to try to crystallize things that are complicated, like, I started off as an anthropologist. In fact, I studied anthropology here in Santa Cruz, actually, many years ago at the university for a year, and really, there was a professor here who was from India, Triloky Pandey, who really inspired me to become an anthropologist. But I was interested in studying anthropology because I wanted to understand human beings and human interactions, and I also wanted to understand this whole idea of conflict and how do we get into conflict? And I was, at that point, it was during the Cold War, I was, you know, I could never quite understand why we were prepared to kind of put the fate of humanity on the line because of what, you know, and I wanted to understand that. That’s why I went into anthropology. And so, going back to your question, I was looking for, you know, I got interested in the field of negotiation, but I’m always looking for what are some simple ways to kind of communicate to people in a way that they can get. And so, for me, visual images, like going to the balcony, which is an image I use as kind of the foundational skill of negotiation that you kind of imagine yourself on a stage negotiating with someone, you know, whoever it is in the broadest sense of the term with someone at home or someone at work. And part of your mind goes to a mental and emotional balcony overlooking that stage where it’s a place of clarity, a place of perspective, a place where you can keep your eyes on the prize. And I find that using metaphors like that for concepts that otherwise might be abstract or a little bit intangible, if people can form a mental picture, it just makes it a lot easier for people to understand. Another one that I’ve always loved, which I was inspired by Sun Tzu, who’s a Chinese, you may know, a Chinese strategist from 2,500 years ago, was he talked about building, in his case, he was talking about martial, you know, war, you know, building the other side, a golden bridge, you know, and in his case, it was a golden bridge to retreat across, but I reframed it as a golden bridge to advance across. And how do you build the other side of golden bridge? In other words, how do you make it as easy as possible for them to make the decision you’d like them to make? And so I’m always looking for either simple distinctions that make things very clear for people, simple stories that kind of highlight those distinctions, and then kind of visual images, because after all, we’re talking about an internal process and the clarity or the simplicity of the concept is what stays with people. You mentioned stories, and I think one of the things I really like about this book is the import and the power that the stories you tell have. And I think that, so just talk about, I mean, you’re a guy who’s been to, I mean, more wars than most people have been to parties. So out of all those wars, out of all those conflicts, huge, small, I mean, everything, how did you choose the ones that went into this book? That’s a really good question. I think I like to write, one of my modalities for liking to write is I like, when I’m trying to think out the book, I go for walks. It’s a great way to do, isn’t it? It is, it’s wonderful. I’m walking, I’m doing nothing, and my wife, what are you doing? Aren’t you supposed to be working on that thing? I am. I find that that’s my balcony. I get out, I live close to the mountains in Colorado, and I just get out in the mountains, and it’s like everything else falls away, and just things get very clear, and so I can hear myself much better somehow when I’m in nature, and so I’m sort of, I like to think through simple kind of templates or frameworks for trying to, for complex processes. Negotiation’s a very complex process. There are many pictures, but it’s like, but the human mind can’t hold onto lots of different things, so I try to get at the essence of it, and then I look for what story comes to me that really kind of encapsulizes that particular point, and you’re right, there’s lots of stories out there, and even thinking, when I’m immersed in an experience, I just came back from Columbia, for example, where I’ve been working for the last four years advising the president and the government about how to resolve a 50-year war. It’s the last war in this hemisphere, a really terrible, tragic war with hundreds of thousands of dead and seven million victims, and there’s a chance to actually end this 50-year war, but sometimes when I’m immersed in it, then I try to think, of all the many things that just happened here, was there five days, was there anything that kind of illustrates, what’s the point, what’s the lesson? I try to go to the balcony, and when I go for my walks, I try to say, okay, so what do I take out of this experience with Columbia? What can I use this experience to kind of illustrate that can deliver a particular point? You’re listening to the Agony Column Literary Magazine on 88.9 KUSP and KUSP.org. I’m your host, Rick Kleffel. Let’s get back to my discussion with William Ury about his new book, Getting to Yes With Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. Well, I think you do that superbly well in this book, and one of the first things that struck me was how easy it is for us to undermine ourselves. We are our own worst obstacle. That’s it, that’s it, we are. And you know, it’s funny, as I was reading it just a moment ago, that the, you know, I spent my life, Roger Fish and I wrote Getting to Yes, whatever, 30, 35 years ago. I worked with him on that. And then probably the most common question I got in the years thereafter when I was talking about Getting to Yes was, yeah, but how do you get to yes with, you know, with people who are difficult? They’re, you know, they’re, you know, fake egos and high emotions and rigid positions and people just want to win at your expense. So I spent a lot of time working on that, but, you know, gradually over time, it somehow dawned on me that the person who’s going to give us the most trouble, the person who’s going to be the biggest obstacle in us getting what we truly want in us being successful in negotiation is not, however difficult they may be, it’s not that difficult person, not the person on the other side of the table, it’s the person on this side of the table. It’s the person we look at in the mirror every morning. Because what I saw is that, you know, negotiation is supposed to be, you know, it’s puzzling because it’s supposed to be goal-oriented behavior. You’re engaging in an interaction with someone. In negotiation, I mean, just very broadly speaking, it’s a process we engage in. Everyone’s a negotiator because, you know, it’s just back and forth communication, just trying to reach agreement on an issue, however small, with your teenager, your toddler, your coworker, whatever it is. But what’s interesting is, even though it’s supposed to be goal-oriented behavior, what I see is that we often act in ways that go exactly contrary to our own interests. You know, as Ambrose Bierce once put it, you know, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. Yeah, there’s a lot of great quotes. You’re a master of pulling in the great quotes in this book. I salute your quotability. You also talk about one of the problems we face is that every conflict is seen as a zero-sum game. It’s the economics of scarcity. And that, in a sense, is really the opponent to both sides of the table. That’s right. That’s right. Because, you know, I mean, it’s interesting. You know, there are a lot of problems in this world. Some are small and some are very large, but I don’t believe there’s any problem in the world, really, that can’t be solved if only we can come together to cooperate, you know? All these problems, whether it’s war, which I deal with, or whether it’s climate change, or whether it’s poverty, or in the micro, you know, it’s a marriage or labor management issue, they’re all made by human beings. And so, you know, where’s the solution? It’s in human beings. It’s us. So if we can learn to cooperate, if we can learn to have a mindset of, you know, there may just, there’s enough for everyone. There can be enough for everyone if we can use our innate human creativity. We often, we so often approach negotiation and life in general as if like, you know, as if it’s kind of the Super Bowl. Who’s gonna win this one? You know, but, you know, it’s a little bit like asking the question, you know, who’s winning your marriage? If you’re asking that question, you know, your marriage is in difficulty. You know, it’s like, we have to change that basic mindset, which is very natural and human, very natural and understandable in us, which is that, you know, that there isn’t enough to go around. This is a dog-eat-dog world, and I better get mine because otherwise it’s gonna be taken away from me. And this is very natural, but that becomes, as you just mentioned, Rick, the adversary because the key, the greatest power we have in negotiation is the power to change the game, is to change the game from a face-to-face confrontation to side-by-side, let’s solve the problem together. Let’s attack the problem rather than attacking each other. And yet that’s hard for us to do, and that’s why I wrote the book because we have to, the change in mindset has to start from within us because we can change that game from inside. Now you give us six steps, and they correspond to the chapters in this book. They’re short, they’re smart. I love the way this is set up because you can really grok this, and that’s very important to have that kind of, as Heinlein put it, that complete intuitive understanding of what’s going on here. The first step is, and I think this is, sounds deceptively simple, is put yourself in your shoes. And in that, what you point out is that knowing yourself and not judging yourself are not the same thing. Yeah, absolutely. Because the key, the foundation, as I was mentioning before, is that metaphor of being able to go to the balcony. It’s this, to be able to negotiate from a place of clarity and perspective. But it’s very hard for people to go to the balcony because we’re, human beings, we’re reaction machines, as people say to me all the time. But I fall off the balcony. So how can you change that inner opponent into an inner ally? How do you take the obstacle and turn it into your greatest opportunity? And the key is, first, you’ve got to understand, just like in negotiation, you have to understand the other side. You have to, in negotiation, the first principle is put yourself in the other side’s shoes, understand what they want, because you’re more likely to be able to influence them if you know what they want. Well, here, the first step is, understand your own inner opponent. You’ve got to understand yourself. You’ve got to see yourself from that balcony perspective and to observe yourself without judging yourself. And that’s not easy to do. But I’ll give you an example. I was mentioning my interactions with President Chavez. At one point, this was a time in Venezuela where there were a million people on the streets of Caracas demanding the downfall of President, the resignation of President Chavez. There were a million people on the streets supporting him, and the whole country was polarized, and it looked like a lot of international observers feared it might tip into a civil war. There was violence. People were arming themselves. Anyway, at one point in this interaction, I had a meeting with him, and it was scheduled for, like, I think 9 o’clock in the presidential palace. And my colleague Francisco and I were waiting there very patiently, and 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock, midnight, finally rushed in to see the president. He’s got his entire cabinet arrayed behind him. He said, so, Yuri, have a seat here. Tell me, what do you think of the situation? And I said, well, Mr. President, I’ve been talking to your government ministers here. I’ve been talking to the other side, and it seems to me there’s some progress. Well, that triggered him. He said, progress? What do you mean, progress? Are you crazy? Are you insane? Are you naive? You’re not seeing the dirty tricks the other side’s up to? And he just got furious, and he proceeded to lean very close into my face, and he proceeded to shout at me for approximately 30 minutes. So, you know, I had to think, wait a minute. You know, part of me was feeling very defensive. What do you mean I’m not crazy? You know, I wanted to, you know, rebut what he was saying, and I was also, you know, feeling like, wow, okay, two years of work down the drain, you know? But, you know, I was able to kind of go to the balcony and ask myself the important question of, wait a minute, what do I really, what’s really gonna advance the situation, or is it really gonna advance the situation if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? So I just kind of bit my tongue, and I just was able to put myself in my own shoes, the first step, in other words, just observe my own feelings. And just by observing my own reactions from a balcony perspective, I was able to kind of let them go, just observe the kind of passing thoughts, feelings, embarrassment, anxiety, defensiveness. And by not acting them out, but simply just watching them, I was able to then, by listening to myself in that sense, I was able then to listen to him. I was able to clear my mind so I could listen to him, and I just gave him my full attention. And, you know, here’s a guy who could talk for eight hours. I’m sure if I got in an argument with him, you know, it would be the end of the relationship. But after 30 minutes of just listening to him, you know, there was no fuel for the fire, so finally I saw his shoulders kind of sink a little bit, and he said to me in a weary tone of voice, he said, so Yuri, what should I do? And then that was my moment, because that’s when a human mind opens. And so I said, well, Mr. President, I think the entire country of Venezuela needs to go to the balcony. I mean, why not? It’s December, why not just declare a truce and let everyone enjoy the holiday with their family, and in January we can come back? And he said, that’s a great idea. In fact, I’m gonna announce that in my next speech. And in fact, he said, his mood had completely shifted. He said, in fact, over Christmas, I’d like you to come with me around the country and visit. But he said, but wait a minute, you’re neutral. I don’t know if that’s so good. You won’t be seen so much as impartial. But he said, that’s no problem. I’ll give you a disguise. I mean. Did you wear a disguise? I did, and I’m not going on that trip, but the thing was, the key thing was the situation from one where it looked like end of the relationship, end of the whole thing, he turned into some, his mood completely shifted. How? Because I’d been able to get to yes with myself. I’d been able to go to the balcony, put myself in my shoes. Then I was able to listen to him. Then I was able to get to yes with him. So it was just a kind of clear example to me of how, if we can do the work inside, it has a direct and positive effect on our relationships with others. Well, I think, too, what interests me as well is that when you learn to observe yourself, and I think that the balcony’s the best vision of mindfulness I’ve ever read. That really nails it for me. It gives me a place where a way to, within your mind, you imagine something physical, and that gives you a way to step away, actually, within your mind. That’s just a key. It’s great, great work, is that one of the benefits of being able to observe yourself is to being able to step away from that fight-or-flight reaction, which is really damaging because what happens when that physical reaction happens, it actually impacts your ability to intellectualize. When you are in that fight-or-flight response, you are unable to think logically. That’s it, that’s absolutely it. And in that particular moment, I was feeling like either getting into a fight with him or maybe running out of the room or whatever it was, but if you’re able to observe it and go to the balcony, then, I mean, in life, you have a choice. You can either identify with it. You can identify it and identify the fight-or-flight from the balcony and then you kind of neutralize its impact on you. You can step back a little bit. You can open up a little space to act in a different way or you get identified with it. So we have this choice, identify or get identified. And- I like that dilemma. That really makes it clear. Right, and so if you want to free yourself from it, you have to be able to, you have to name the game, name what’s going on. If you can name, oh, there’s a fight. You know, I could see, for example, oh, okay, I feel like getting into an argument. If you can see that, you can catch yourself and say, wait a minute, is that really gonna serve the purpose here? And then you can direct things in the way that will actually produce a constructive result. Now, you also talk about the inner critic and I think the inner critic is often our own worst enemy. That’s who really tears us down. And what interests me too is that when we, it’s been my experience that when we accuse others of something, when we are projecting out and saying you’re doing this, you’re doing that, 99% of the time and 99% of the things we say are things that our inner critics have identified as problems within ourselves. That’s it, that’s exactly it. We’re projecting on the outside what’s going on in the inside. And so what I find as a useful exercise, like in the morning sometimes when I, you know, I just kind of sit there and I just watch my mind for a moment and I can see, I see the inner critic and then rather than suppress the inner critic, which just makes the inner critic, you know, go underground and then act by subterfuge, what I like to do is just to kind of like, okay, it’s like I imagine a kind of kitchen table and I say, okay, inner critic, you can have a seat right here. And, you know, if there’s any anxiety about getting through the day, okay, you can have a seat right here or fear. You like to give them even names and stuff like that. And just so, and just watch the conversation from a balcony perspective and just realize, okay, there is that flow of thoughts and feelings. And as long as I am on the balcony, you know, I’m not them, you know, so, but, you know, in other words, I don’t try to suppress them because oftentimes they have very useful information. I mean, the inner critic may have some useful information as long as you don’t, you know, take him or her that seriously, you know, it’s just, okay, okay, there’s, you know, just like you treat them like an old familiar kind of character, okay, I see you. Because to me, if we listen to the inner critic in the sense of heed the inner critic, we undermine ourselves and we undermine our ability to be at our best in both with ourselves and with others. For the Agony column in KUSP, this is Rick Cleffa with the Literary Events Calendar for the week of February 15th. To include your event in our listing, please email me at agonyattrashiltron.com. At Bookshop Santa Cruz this week on a Tuesday, February 17th at 7 p.m., it’s Laurie R. King with her latest Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novel, Dreaming Spies. On Thursday, February 19th at 7 p.m., it’s a Book Group Mixer. For more information about events at Bookshop Santa Cruz, call 423-0900 or on the web, visit bookshopsantacruz.com. For the Agony column in KUSP, this is Rick Cleffa with Who’s Reading In and Around the County for the week of February 15th. Get out there and read a book. You’re listening to the Agony column Literary Magazine on 88.9 KUSP and KUSP.org. In the second half of the show, we’ll hear more from William Ury about his new book, Getting to Yes With Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. Chances are you’re familiar with emojis, those little picture characters you can send in text messages. Well, you’re about to have even more options. With the next update, which should come in the middle of this year, you will be able to set one of five skin tones for your emoji. I’m Kai Risdahl, trying to make emojis more inclusive. Next time on Marketplace from APN. All your business news on Marketplace tomorrow and every weekday at three o’clock here on 88.9 KUSP and KUSP.org. KUSP makes life a bit more interesting by connecting you to the best in music, literature, film, and the Monterey Bay region’s cultural scene. Please help keep the station vibrant. Won’t you click and donate at our secure website, kusp.org? Thank you. Family Service Center for the Central Coast needs volunteers and care facilities to lead art groups and visit patients. To learn more about IU Ventures or Ageless Art, call 423-9444. Welcome back to the Agony Column Literary Magazine on 88.9 KUSP and KUSP.org. I’m your host, Rick Kleffel. Let’s get back to William Urie about his new book, Getting to Yes With Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. Now, you have a term that I thought was great, the crossroads, coming to your own crossroads, spotting that, that is a rockin’ term. So explain what that means. Yeah, it’s like inside us, it goes back to that choice. From a balcony, you’re in a situation, you can feel some anger come up. Let’s say, imagine you’re at work and you get an email and you realize, wait a minute, they didn’t consult me on that. I was supposed to be there, you know? And you get angry. You have, at that particular moment, you know, the chemicals are going through your body, you’re angry at that moment. But then, if you can just pause for a moment, if there’s a moment, and maybe it takes a few seconds, but just take a breath, it goes down. Then you have a particular moment. You can either go with the seduction of that and kind of go, okay, I’m gonna get in that anger, you know, I’m gonna go with it. Yeah, you see, that anger is sexy. I love that. And then once you think about that, then you realize, no, maybe not so much. You know, is that really gonna, you know, or you can choose to, you know what? I’m just gonna, you know, I’m not gonna suppress the anger, but I’m just gonna not, you know, act out of that anger. We have that cross, you know, there’s that crossroads all the time where, from the balcony, we can choose. You know, you have this choice. We don’t realize it. Sometimes we think, okay, I have no choice. You know, I remember years ago, I was doing some anthropological field work in New Guinea, these warriors of New Guinea, and, you know, the tribal warriors, and I was talking to a fellow who was trying to teach them conflict resolution, and he said, you know, he used this concept of the balcony, you know, he was using some of my material, and he said, that was kind of revolutionary to them that they actually had a choice, because they always thought, if someone killed someone in their tribe, they immediately had to kill someone back, and, you know, it’s called payback, you know? But they suddenly realized, wait a minute, I have a choice, you know? There’s a choice, and that’s enormously empowering, and that was kind of revolutionary for them that they actually had a choice to decide immediately, am I gonna kill someone else, and then they’re gonna kill someone, and, you know, it just keeps on, you know, an eye for an eye, and we all go blind, but you have a choice to interrupt that process. That’s the crossroads. Now, you also suggest that we, you’re right, that you want us to cultivate your inner scientists. You are the investigator, and the subject of your investigation is yourself. I love this idea of questioning authority, especially your own. Right, and I think that’s what you’re doing. I mean, the foundation of being able to change your own behavior, change your own responses, you have to see it first, you have to observe it, and so it is like being a scientist. It’s, you’re, you know, you’re doing what psychologists call me-search. Yeah, I like that term, me-search. Right, that’s it. I mean, and that’s what you’re doing from the balconies, you’re observing. You know, I was trained as an anthropologist, and what we learned, here in Santa Cruz, actually, and what we learned was the method of participant observation, which is… Right, I like, that was another good one, too. Boy, there’s so much in this book. As an anthropologist, what do you do? You go into a different culture, and you don’t just observe it as if from the outside. You participate in it, you participate in the rituals, you participate in the daily life, you learn the language, you live with the people, so you’re a participant, and at the same time, you’re an observer. If we can take that same methodology into our own life, we participate, of course, we’re participants in our own life, but we also need to have, part of us, it’s on the balcony, kind of observing, then we’re gonna be able to catch ourselves and see, really, ask ourselves the fundamental question, what do we really want, you know? And what course of action will get us there? Because then we’ll get beyond the self-sabotage. It’s the old tube song, what do you want from life? Right. And you know, what’s interesting to me is that, you know, sometimes, either people, we don’t know what we want, or we think we know what we want, but we don’t, we haven’t really probed. You know, there’s an example I give in the book of an experience I had, which was, you know, about a year and a half ago, I was invited by someone I knew who was a leader of a major corporation in Brazil, a Brazilian entrepreneur, and her father, who’d founded this company, and it was, you know, Brazil’s largest retailer, had like 150,000 employees, and he was involved in a huge legal dispute with his former partner over control of the company. This is kind of, this carries through the book. I think this makes a nice spine for the book. I love this story. Yeah, because it was such an interesting story, because it was like, it was huge, it was public, I think the Financial Times called it perhaps the largest cross-continental boardroom showdown in recent history. It was all over the news, and the whole question was who’s gonna win, and it was going over two and a half years, and there were dozens and dozens of lawyers battling it out, and she said, you know, it’s just causing my father so much stress, and the family, and the employees, all these divided loyalties. Can you help? And I said, I don’t know if I can help, but at least I’ll meet with your dad, and so I, you know, I was down in Brazil, and I met with him at his home, and as I listened to him, it was clear to me, you know, he wasn’t so sure. Did he want to carry on the fight? Because he was gonna be chairman of the board for another eight years. He was 76 at the time, so until he was 84, he was gonna be chairman of the board. Every, it was all acrimonious. Is this, did he want to fight, or did he want to find a way out? And then finally I asked him, so his name is Abelio. I said, Abelio, what do you really want? I mean, what do you want here? And he said, well, and he knew what he wanted, you know, and this is like, like us, we know what we want. He said, oh, okay, I want my stock at a certain price, and I want elimination of the three-year non-compete clause, and I want a piece of real estate, you know, like five or six things. But as I listened to him, I asked him, I said, but Abelio, you’re a man who’s got everything. I mean, the guy’s a, you know, billionaire. I said, so what do you really want in life? I mean, what do you really want? And after, I probed for a while. He finally said, he said in Portuguese, he said, liberdade, which means freedom. That’s what he wanted. He said, I want my freedom. And I, that was like, you know, okay, I got it. I was getting to the human being here, not just the champion businessman, but the human being. I said, so what do you want the freedom for? He said, well, you know, my family means everything to me. I want freedom to spend time with my family, and I want freedom to pursue my business dreams. That’s what I want. And once we knew what he wanted, freedom, you know, once he was able to get to that yes inside himself, find out what his own yes was, then, you know, as complicated as the negotiation was, there’d been a failed negotiation for 18 months, once my colleague and I sat down with the representative of the other side in Paris at a restaurant, he was on a Monday, and he said, well, what are you doing here? And I said, I said, I’m here very simply because life is too short. That’s why I’m here. And, you know, it’s too short for these kind of fights that just, you know, destroy so many people’s lives. And so he said, so how would you, how would you resolve it? I said, well, if you, if we could just agree on these two basic principles, freedom for each man and dignity, then I think we might be able to get somewhere. Anyway, he invited me back on Tuesday to talk with him. And anyway, by Friday, we had both men sitting together, signing an agreement, joint press release, making joint announcement to the company’s employees and executives. And Abelio said, you know, I got everything I wanted, but most importantly, I got my life back. And that’s because he was able to get to yes with himself and that helped him get to yes with others. You have this term, BATNA. So tell us what BATNA is and why it’s so important because I think it’s another very key concept here. And the one that’s important is the inner BATNA. Right, that’s it. So BATNA is a term that Roger Fisher and I coined with getting to yes. It’s basically, it’s an acronym standing for your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In other words, it’s your walkaway option. If you can’t, for example, reach agreement, let’s say you’re applying for a job and you’re not gonna get this one job, you’re not gonna be able to agree with the say about salary and conditions, then it’s much better to have in mind that you have another possibility, another job offer, it gives you a sense of confidence and freedom. It’s a source of power in negotiation to always know what your alternative is. But the interesting thing is what I find is, again, for every one of these major steps in getting to yes, there’s a psychological antecedent. And in this case, what blocks us from identifying and developing our own power to meet our basic needs? It’s our own, what I’ve come to think of it as our own inner BATNA, which is our commitment to ourselves to take care of our own needs. I mean, if I just go back to the Abelio story for a moment, when he told me what he really wanted, which was freedom, the next question I had to him was about BATNA. I said, so Abelio, who can give you what you most want? Who can really give you the freedom you most want? Is it just your arch enemy? In other words, you’re just his hostage, that’s it? Or to some extent, at least, is it you? Can you yourself grant yourself your own freedom? Well, once he had that aha, he said, oh yeah, okay. So even irrespective of what the other side does, he went ahead and he said, oh, I can go ahead and pursue other business deals. I can become chairman of another company. I can spend time with, go on a nice holiday with my family. And interestingly, paradoxically, having identified his inner BATNA, in other words, said, I can meet my own needs. Psychologically, that freedom, so that he was less dependent on the other side, and that actually opened up the psychological space to reach an agreement with the other side. So when we’re not, when you absolutely are so dependent on the other side and you absolutely need them, that’s when you don’t negotiate effectively, either out of fear you give in or you get very irate and attack them or whatever, you know, like in a marriage, if one side is so needy and dependent on the other, you know, it doesn’t go well. So the best situations are when you care, of course you care, but not that much, because you know that inside yourself, you have that inner confidence, that inner BATNA, that inner ability to take care of your own needs, no matter what the other side does. And that makes it a lot easier to negotiate and get to yes with others. So again, it’s another getting to yes with yourself, saying yes to your own power to meet your own basic psychological needs that then allows you to deal with very difficult conflicts with others. And this kind of speaks to the notion of blame, where you, when you blame, you absolutely give away your power to change both yourself and the situation. You just give, or affect any other change, you just give it all away. You say, it’s the other person’s fault, which essentially is a way of saying, inversely, I’m powerless. That’s it, that’s, you know, everywhere I go in conflict, you know, whether it’s family situations or work situations or global politics, everyone’s pointing the finger, you know, it’s the blame game, you know, why did you do this? Because they did that, you know, and it’s just finger pointing. You know, I give an example in the book of, I was working many years ago in bringing American and Soviet policymakers together to talk about how to, the nuclear issue and how to reduce the risk of nuclear war. And every single session we would have, you know, the first day or two was just, you did this and you did this and you’re to blame or whatever, you know, everyone’s just pointing fingers. So finally, after the, like the third session of this, I said, I’ve had it. So I printed on the agendas, the first session for before breakfast, and it was, the session was entitled mutual accusations. And everyone was invited, anyone who wanted to do that, show up before breakfast and you can point your finger all you want. And everyone got the point. And that’s what I think is that the blame game, I mean, even though you think you’re powerful when you’re blaming the other side, what you’re doing, as you just said, is you’re subtly undermining your own power because you’re saying only the other side has the ability to help you now by taking responsibility for meeting your own needs, taking responsibility for the relationship, even if the other side, maybe it’s 99% theirs or whatever, but focusing on the 1% that’s maybe yours in this situation and taking responsibility, you take your power back to change the situation. And that’s what you say is that taking responsibility lies at the root of the most successful resolutions you’ve negotiated yourself. Exactly, it’s when one, you know, I mean, right now I’m headed off to the Middle East in a few weeks. Really? Who are you working with? Well, I’m going to Israel and Palestine and Jordan and it’s a whole nother project, but, you know, you go there and I remember what one person there has explained to me, you’ve got to understand, Bill, he said, this is a situation where everyone’s a victim. You know, you talk to one side, they’re the victims. You talk to the other side, they’re the victims. And they’re just locked into that blame and victim. But where things shift is when one side says, look, you know, I’m responsible, you know, for the relationship. You know, it doesn’t mean you’re, responsibility is not the same as self-blame. It just means responsibility. I’m going to have the ability to respond in a constructive way. And by taking responsibility and saying, I’m going to be responsible for this, then you open up the path to changing the situation. And that’s the key is what I’ve seen so often for success, you know, take other examples like I had the privilege of being able to observe the transformation in South Africa. And, you know, Mandela took responsibility. You know, it wasn’t just, he didn’t just spend all his time blaming the other side. He said, no, we’ve got to change the situation and took responsibility and fought for the freedom, not just of the blacks, but of the whites too. That’s what allows the situation to shift. You also talk too about gratitude, the importance of gratitude. And gratitude has an inverse, I think, too, in blame. It’s kind of like if you just turn blame, pulled it inside out, it becomes gratitude. So talk about the importance of gratitude. Yeah, well, Rick, you know, it’s funny because I used to think, you know, when you got some need met, when you were satisfied, gratefulness follows happiness. But then I realized over time that actually gratefulness is the best doorway into satisfaction. In other words, if you cultivate a habit of just recognizing what’s, you know, just every one of us, I mean, Gabby is my, you know, again, my best teacher here, my daughter is like, there’s so many things that she could, you know, think, you know, there’s nothing we’re grateful for, but just she’s, and my wife too, they’re able to kind of cultivate gratitude and just feel grateful for what they have. And that makes them happy. And so there’s a way in which, again, all of these things go back to the crossroads. We have a choice, you know, we have a choice to, you know, see this glass as half empty. It is maybe half empty, or we can see it as half full. You can focus your attention where you like, you can be grateful for you’ve got this water, or you can just focus on everything you don’t have. And that framing, you know, framing and reframing is one of the great, most powerful techniques in negotiation of how you choose to interpret the situation affects it. So the people that I know who are the most satisfied and the most effective in getting along with other people are people who recognize that simple power of gratitude, gratitude to life for the lessons that life is affording us, even in, you know, the most difficult situations. You know, for example, a week ago was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which reminded me of Viktor Frankl, who was one of the inmates in Auschwitz, you know, the celebrated. Great writers. Yeah, amazing writer, you know, man’s search for freedom. And here he was, what he realized, here’s a distinguished Viennese psychiatrist who somehow is then, you know, in Nazi concentration camp. And he wrote this book just after it was released. And the book, Man’s Search for Freedom, the original title in German was, Say Yes, Saying Yes to Life, no matter what, basically, in spite of everything. That’s what it was, saying yes to life in spite of everything. And because he recognized the ability to be grateful and he tells a poignant story in that book about a young woman who was dying and he was trying to be a kind of a doctor and help, do whatever he could, even under those huge, horrible circumstances. And he goes in to see her and she’s lying in her bed and she says to him, you know, doctor, this may sound very odd, but I’m grateful that life has given me this chance. He says, what do you mean? He says, well, she says, you know, in my former life, I was very comfortable and everything, but now I’m able even to talk to this tree. And she pointed out, there’s a window, you couldn’t even see a tree. It was like one little tiny branch with two leaves on it. And he thought, is she hallucinating? So he said, so he’s worried about her. So he says, well, what did the tree say? So the tree said, I am life, eternal life. And so she was, even in, you know, in those arduous circumstances, far from family and friends in the most horrible circumstances, he was so moved that someone like that could actually find in herself, you know, an ounce of gratitude. So he realizes that if someone can do that in the most horrible circumstances, then we who have so much better circumstances, you know, if we could just take a lesson from that young woman whose name we’ll never know. So it’s just, to me, it’s the power of gratitude is just vastly, vastly underestimated. Well, you know, and this is, I love numbers, and this is an interesting number, 12 to 60,000 thoughts per day, most of which are negative. Right. What a, that’s problematic. It is, it is. You know, that’s what psychologists estimate. And, you know, that’s our inner critic. That’s, you know, those are those negative thoughts. And that’s why the foundation of this is the ability to, you know, go to the balcony, put ourselves in our shoes, accept ourselves. You know, it was Carl Rogers, whom I had the privilege of knowing, you know, the great humanistic psychologist, who said, oddly enough, people think that if they accept themselves, that just means you’re not gonna do anything about it. He says, but oddly enough, if I accept myself, that creates the conditions for me to change. And so if we can do that, if we can heed that wise advice by accepting ourselves, by accepting ourselves, just as we are accepting all those, that negativity, but just, you know, just accepting ourselves, that may be the greatest gift we can give. That, paradoxically, allows us to change for the better. And in order to do that, we need to stay in the zone. And me, Kyle, you know, she sent me, hi. And you’re one of the few people who can pronounce his name. I’ve had a lot of practice recently. He created this idea of the zone. So talk about, the balcony is essentially the zone, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s it, that’s it. And so what all of this doing, you know, the zone is, you know, something that athletes talk about. It’s this kind of state of mind that Mihaly talked about, it’s flow, or artists talk about it. It’s kind of a, it’s that state that all of us actually have access to occasionally that gives us, when we’re at our, both at our peak performance, but also perhaps most intense, you know, satisfaction, when you’re not focused on the past, you’re not just thinking about just what happened. You know, it’s like tennis. You’re not just thinking about the last point. You’re not thinking about, you know, the next thing. You’re just in the moment. That’s when you have the greatest power to change things. And so to me, I’ve noticed this in my own work as a mediator, as a negotiator, is, you know, in conflict situations, it’s so easy to get lost in the past. Resentment, you guys did this, and you did that, whatever, or to worry about the future. But actually the only place where you can change things, the only, the real opportunity you have is right now in the present moment. So if we’re able to stay in the zone, we’re all, we’re both, we’re gonna be more satisfied inside ourselves, but we’re gonna be a lot more effective at being able to change that situation for the better. William Ury’s new book is Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents. Thank you for speaking with me, William. It’s been a real pleasure, Rick. I wanna wish your listeners much success in getting to yes with yourself and other worthy opponents. We just heard from William Ury about his new book, Getting to Yes with Yourself and Other Worthy Opponents.